I’m not obsessive but I keep things I want to consume or work on around for way too long. If I remove one item, two items get added. The pile is constantly growing. And it drowns my energy.

\n\n

I have the habit of reading the easy things first and postpone the harder things. It feels easier to focus on the quick wins and reduce the influx by checking them off. Rather read news than work on a project. Maybe I’m kind of a news junkie.

\n\n

Because I work in digital media and creating software, whatever I do is related to digital things. No escape. Information overload keeps getting higher and higher.

\n\n

I love computers and technology. But it doesn’t feel beneficial anymore to consume large amounts of information. At least I stopped using Facebook.

Comment spam on WordPress blogs can easily be avoided without the need for plugins if you configure your own servers. Just turning off comments in settings will not remove the ability for spammers to access the WordPress commenting facility.

\n\n

The WordPress file wp-comments-post.php is responsible for accepting comments and is globally accessible. Disallowing access to this file altogether would mean nobody can ever submit a comment, regardless of what is configured in WordPress.

\n\n

The Basic Idea

\n\n

The basic idea to fight spam is to only allow commenting if the referrer is your server. That’s always the case for legitimate commenters, because they have to be on the corresponding page using a browser to actually type and submit the comment. Spammers normally don’t set the referrer so they would be turned away.

\n\n

For that to work we have to manually configure the web server which is running WordPress. I use nginx and stopped using Apache for performance reasons.

\n\n

nginx

\n\n

We have to set valid referrers for which we conveniently choose nginx’s server_name variable, which has to be manually set for every virtual host. This is most likely the domain name. In my case it’s michaelnordmeyer.com.

To be able to execute PHP for valid comments, we have to include the PHP settings so nginx knows how to submit the request to PHP. As I run Ubuntu Server all settings are stored in /etc/nginx/sites-available/. I chose to have a modular configuration setup so I included the settings from a file called php-fpm.include which looks like this:

Apple released an “update” to the iPad Air 2 some time ago. It looks the same, is faster but also thicker and heavier. The display is not laminated anymore. A feature I really liked. And no rose gold. It’s actually a faster iPad Air, without the 2. Yes, they re-introduced a faster older model, sort of.

\n\n

And it’s cheaper. A move to differentiate the iPad Pro line from the common models. It may animate more people to update their old iPads. So it’s probably a good move on Apple’s part.

\n\n

But I liked the iPad Air 2 very much and I’m a little bummed they discontinued the model. The switch from my iPad Air to my iPad Air 2 was a step-up. I waited for some months in autumn of 2014, suffering from upgrade fatigue. But in the end I gave in a day before Christmas and made myself a present. And it was a step-up. Definitely worth the upgrade. Even lighter and thinner than the old model. Even if the difference was not much, it feels much better while using it.

\n\n

Of course, Touch ID is the most interesting feature. I was so used to Touch ID on my iPhone that I couldn’t live without it. And 2 GB RAM instead of 1 GB meant less reloading of webpages in Safari when using many tabs and less reloading of app contents after switching apps.

\n\n

Now most of it is available in the 2017 iPad 9.7″. A little heavier, thicker and with a inferior display, but for a lower price. Whatever, I switched to the 12.9″ iPad Pro and will wait for the rumoured 10.5″-ish iPad.

My computing life is good. I like having a MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone. It feels like I have less problems than I had ten years before. But then I had a realization: almost all my problems I have nowadays come from my iPad and iPhone and how to get data on or off it. Syncing and stuff.

\n\n

My MacBook is always running the latest version of the operating system as do my iOS devices. And the last major macOS problem was the dreaded discoveryd problem in 2014/2015 running Yosemite. I also had a problem at about the same time or a couple of months earlier where my MacBook wouldn’t reconnect with the Wi-Fi after waking it. And a Finder bug, where drag and drop wouldn’t work, because Finder didn’t register a moved window. I had to drop files on ghost windows. Locations on the screen where the moved window has been before.

\n\n

These were all my computer aka Mac problems in the last 4+ years. But I have so many problems related to iCloud and getting data on and off my iOS devices. I spent countless hours, days even, on those problems. iCloud Drive, iCloud Photo Library and incorrectly syncing 3rd party iOS apps, which used iCloud to sync app data or settings.

\n\n

Touch devices made my life better in so many regards. But the uncomfortable truth is that at least 90 % of my tech troubles came from those devices and how I wanted to integrate them with my life.

"
},
{
"id": "/switched-back-markdown-visual-editor-wordpress",
"url": "https://michaelnordmeyer.com/switched-back-markdown-visual-editor-wordpress",
"title": "Why I Switched Back From Markdown to Visual Editor on WordPress",
"date_published": "2016-12-25 14:17:00 +0000",
"summary": "I was an early adopter of Markdown. Now I use WordPress’ visual editor exclusively again with great results and don’t miss Markdown a bit.",
"content_html": "

I was an early adopter of Markdown. Markdown is a straight-forward way to write HTML without having to drown in tag soup.

\n\n

The Problem with Markdown in WordPress

\n\n

Markdown is more of an afterthought in WordPress. It has been officially supported when WordPress was more than eight years old. Because of the way WordPress stores Markdown in the database (attribute post_content_filtered in table wp_posts) it is more of a hack. It should be stored in the canonical place in the database (attribute post_content in table wp_posts). But in there there’s only HTML, which gets updated automatically when the post is saved.

\n\n

I use a WordPress plugin called Broken Link Checker to check for broken links on my site. If the plugin finds those links, I can easily correct broken links on the Broken Link Checker result screen. This is much easier than to open the post in a new tab, finding the link in the text, edit and subsequently save it. The only problem is that Broken Link Checker only knows about post_content and edits the HTML stored in there. Which means the Markdown is gone afterwards. (More very technical details)

\n\n

But being WordPress there are plugins which can convert your HTML posts to Markdown. But they also have to store it in the wrong place. So the cycle repeats.

\n\n

A Realization

\n\n

After a couple of cycles I realized that a) Markdown can be converted to HTML and vice-versa a couple of times and I don’t lose any data, and b) the visual editor got much better. Especially supporting themes change the visual editor’s text display to match the theme’s display. So you see while editing not only bold and italics etc., but exactly the look you’ll get when the post has been published.

\n\n

The Future

\n\n

This was about two years ago. Now WordPress even uses native apps to replace the old wp-admin interface. The apps work like the WordPress.com website, even for self-hosted WordPress installs like mine. And there are mobile apps for iOS and Android as any self-respecting company has. So the need for Markdown is not very high in those scenarios.

\n\n

It’s even a bad idea to use Markdown in those mobile apps. You can successfully write in Markdown, but after publishing all the editing has to be done in HTML text view. Iiek.

\n\n

For editing text files directly which eventually produce HTML pages for static blog engines, Markdown is still king-of-the-hill. But this is about WordPress. So no Markdown for me anymore.

\n\n

The only downside of the current visual editor: you have to use text view (HTML) to see all links immediately without clicking on them. Not a big problem though.

There are some pitfalls when it comes to data usage. Data charges can add up quickly, especially when tethering. I write this from the perspective of a MacBook, iPhone and iPad user, which uses those devices heavily and interchangeably.

\n\n

Habits Which Need a Lot of Data

\n\n

\n

Updating iOS apps in iTunes on macOS. I have about 140 apps for iPhone and iPad. Those get automatically downloaded to iTunes on macOS when the device is synced with iTunes. They won’t be deleted automatically if the apps get deleted from iOS devices. Manually updating those uses a significant amount of data. If 20 apps get upgraded and a single app is 50 MB, 1 GB of data is used to update those apps. (They are only come to use if the iOS device is restored from backup while being connected to iTunes or the app has been removed from the App Store. Then the apps won’t be downloaded from the iTunes store but from local iTunes on this computer.) Mayor apps like Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype etc. are most likely bigger and weigh 80–100 MB.

\n

Watching YouTube a lot or downloading movies and TV shows. Well, no surprise. Video uses a lot of data. The higher the video resolution and the longer the video, the higher the data.

\n

Video chat. It’s video, see above.

\n

Streaming music. A high-quality music stream (256 Kbit/s) uses about 2 MB per minute and 112.5 MB per hour. So nine hours of music streaming uses about 1 GB of data.

\n

Audio books. Audio books are like music. A high quality audio book (128 Kbit/s) uses half of what high-quality music does.

\n

Online and iCloud backup. iOS devices get automatically backed-up daily if connected to power, locked and being on Wi-Fi. The next backup size can be seen at Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > iCloud Manage Storage > (The current device) > Next Backup Size. But these numbers change daily depending on what has changed on the device.

\n

iCloud Photo Library. If enabled this will upload all photos and videos shot by this device to iCloud so they can be synced to different devices and are effectively backed-up. Depending on the amount of photos and videos shot on a day, these can add up to hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes. Uploads are only done when on Wi-Fi.

\n

\n\n

Habits Which Use a Medium Amount of Data

\n\n

\n

Text messaging while sharing images and videos in this chat. Images use a couple of megabytes each. Videos use much more, likely dozens to hundreds of megabytes.

\n

Email having attachments. Attachments can be large, up to the tens of megabytes. Images in emails are either attachments or have to be downloaded from the internet while viewing.

\n

Web pages. Web pages can be small, because it’s just text. But most web pages have many images, fonts, styling, scripts which add useful behavior, and tracking and ad scripts. Fancier web pages start at 1 MB per page and can go to 5 MB. Homepage use more data than article pages. Scrolling down a long homepage may load data in the background, which can multiply the amount of data used for this page if scrolled long enough.

\n

Maps. Maps use a medium amount of data. If you use maps for navigation and drive and hundreds of kilometers or miles, data usage can add up to hundreds of megabytes. Traditional navigation app have offline map data so they don’t have to use any data to display the route.

\n

\n\n

Habits Which Don’t Need a Lot of Data

\n\n

\n

Text messaging. Text uses a negligible amount of data compared to other formats. If you attach images and videos the amount of data increases massively.

\n

Email without attachments. Emails without attachments and images are mostly text. See Text messaging.

\n

Notifications. Notifications are very small amounts of text.

\n

Location data. Location data uses a very small amount. See above if you use maps.

\n

Background updates. In general they don’t use a lot of data if the app is conscious about data usage.

\n

\n\n

Things Eating Your Data Allowance You Don’t Know of

\n\n

\n

Automatic app updates. Automatic app updates run in the background on iOS and, if enabled, on macOS. They only run on Wi-Fi, but Macs can be tethered and won’t know about the phone using mobile data. Updates on iOS are much more frequent. It’s also likely that most people have more iOS apps than macOS apps, because they are cheaper and big companies have to have mobile apps, but get away with having just a website on desktop, like Facebook. An average non-gaming iOS app may be 50 MB in size, gaming apps are in the hundreds of megabytes. Some apps like Facebook, Facebook Messenger or TripAdvisor for example are updated every two weeks. And they are 80–100 MB in size. At least iOS only downloads changes and not the whole app again.

\n

Podcast subscriptions. If you enabled automatic downloads of new podcast episodes on mobile and didn’t restrict it to only download on Wi-Fi, you may download a lot of data. This depends on the amount of subscriptions and updates to those. Podcasts use a quarter to half of what music uses. But they are much longer than the average song.

\n

\n\n

Bottom Line

\n\n

The bottom line is simple: Video, music streaming and app updates use the most data. The rest depends on your usage pattern and frequency. This is no surprise, but sometimes it’s hard to understand for what the data has been used for. And hopefully in the near future mobile data plans will have much more data included for a reasonable price. Then only video and excessive music streaming will be an issue.

"
},
{
"id": "/the-problem-with-owning-movies-today",
"url": "https://michaelnordmeyer.com/the-problem-with-owning-movies-today",
"title": "The Problem With Owning Movies Today",
"date_published": "2016-11-24 20:54:09 +0000",
"summary": "I want to buy movies but buying them on iTunes or Google Play would limit the ability to switch platforms because of high additional costs.",
"content_html": "

I don’t want to buy physical discs. They need a dedicated player and a place for storage. They have to be manufactured and sent around the world. I can’t play them on my iPads. But I can lend or resell them. I never owned a DVD or Blu-Ray player, only DVD-ROMs in notebooks. And I don’t plan on changing this. But…

\n\n

To get decent movies – original audio language, sometimes with subtitles – there’s only one option: iTunes US. iTunes Germany doesn’t have the original soundtrack for all movies, Google Play only has German audio. That’s no news and I’m on iTunes US for a couple of years already.

\n\n

But every time I want to buy movies or especially movie collections – like currently Indiana Jones or Star Trek (14 movies altogether for $105) – I wonder if I have for some reason or the other to abandon iTunes (because I switch to Android) or iTunes US (because Apple makes it impossible for non-US citizens to use it). That would mean I have to spend hundreds of dollars to buy these movies again. But the same restrictions mentioned above will apply: no proper audio language and a chance of switching again.

\n\n

This sucks.

\n\n

Modern technology and the Internet are supposed to make things easier, not harder. I’m willing to spend money to support the people who created those movies, but I might have to buy the same movies again and again.

\n\n

Pirating movies is not a solution. Apart from the negative effects on the creators of these movies, I have to store those movies somewhere. And I want to have access to all of them anytime. From my iPads or other devices. And there’s a good chance I will replace my ordinary macOS devices with iOS or Android ones in private settings so computer-local storage won’t help. And at least on iOS devices there’s no easy way to download those movies after setting up a new device.

\n\n

Keeping pirated movies or any purchased movie which is not re-downloadable on some sort of network device means I have to run it all the time and I also have to create backups. This is time-consuming, costs additional money every month (you really want to have at least one online backup). It also means I have to micro-manage my tech stuff. If I’m not at home I can’t access my movies. And I also don’t want to run some NAS like the Synology ones to remedy some of the above problems somewhat.

To make things clear I’m not writing about deleting an iCloud email account from an iOS device or Mac, but deleting the whole account altogether. Look here for removing an iCloud email account from a device. Read on for how to delete an iCloud email account altogether.

\n\n

iCloud accounts have often been used as the Apple ID for Apple services like iTunes Store or iOS App Store. Deleting an iCloud account would mean a user couldn’t login and purchased items like movies, TV shows, eBooks and apps wouldn’t be accessible anymore.

\n\n

Maybe customers losing access to purchased goods is a risk Apple doesn’t want to take, so they disallow deleting an iCloud email account. But there are some options to handle an iCloud email address which may help to circumvent any inconveniences stemming from not being able to delete the account.

I’m much faster when using physical keyboards on iPad. Especially the 9.7″ iPads, where there’s no number row. But some things are a major bummer.

\n\n

No option to turn off the caps the lock key

\n\n

I accidentally hit the caps lock key without noticing it. There’s no visible indication that caps lock has been turned on. So after typing a couple of words I have to erase them, turn off caps lock and type them again.

\n\n

Spotlight search is slow to accept typing

\n\n

Using Spotlight on an iPad with a physical keyboard by hitting command+space is slow. You get the normal animation you would get when using the touchscreen. While it’s helpful when using the touchscreen as it mimics the gestures you do, it’s useless when using a physical keyboard as there is nothing to mimic. And because of the animation the typed keys are not registered. You have to wait until the animation has finished. But it looks like iOS 10 is way faster.

\n\n

Bluetooth losing connection

\n\n

On keyboards which use Bluetooth to connect to iPads — that means all keyboards but the Smart Keyboard — there are intermittent connection drops which make it an awkward typing experience. Typed characters appear on the screen delayed. Especially using the arrow or delete keys are awkward in this moment as you never know if you hit the keys a sufficient number of times or more.

\n\n

Solutions

\n\n

The first two points can be addressed by Apple in a future iOS update. The last one probably not. Bluetooth has always been unreliable for me since — I don’t know — the first time I used it over 15 years ago? I don’t expect it to change anytime in the future.

You know the problem. You used a Google account to login to some Google app on iOS. Now you want to get rid of this login for some reason. Just logging out won’t help as the apps remember the used accounts.

\n\n

Deleting all the Google apps won’t help either because reinstalling will surface the logins again. Resetting the iOS advertising identifier to avoid Google being able to fetch the old login data from their servers won’t help either.

\n\n

So it seems the logins are neither stored on this device nor on Google’s servers but most likely in some sort of iCloud app storage facility which you can’t delete. Apps have the ability to use iCloud storage to store settings for free.

\n\n

That means the Google logins will persist for this iCloud login. Quite annoying especially if you don’t want to link different Goggle accounts because of privacy reasons. But there is an easy way to delete the stored Google logins.

\n\n

Installing Gmail

\n\n

Installing Gmail gives the option to remove a login from the account settings page in Gmail iOS on either iPhone or iPad. By doing this all logins will be removed from all Google apps including YouTube, Google Maps, Google Chrome and others.

\n\n

To remove a login tap Accounts > Edit > Remove for all the logins you want to remove. Removing a Google login from one app deletes it for all installed Google apps on this device.

\n\n

The same goes for Google Drive, Google Hangouts and Google Calendar. These apps can manage accounts more thoroughly than the rest of the Google apps. Maybe Google will enhance the other apps in the future as well.

\n\n

It took me some time to figure this out as I didn’t have one of those apps installed on my devices. The Google apps I used and where I wanted to get rid of the accounts don’t have this ability.

"
},
{
"id": "/icloud-drive-and-apples-own-os-x-file-types-which-wont-open-on-ios",
"url": "https://michaelnordmeyer.com/icloud-drive-and-apples-own-os-x-file-types-which-wont-open-on-ios",
"title": "iCloud Drive and Apple’s Own OS X File Types, Which Won’t Open on iOS",
"date_published": "2016-03-27 17:07:44 +0000",
"summary": "It’s definitely reasonable to have a personal or private iOS-only setup. You just have to be aware some OS X files won’t open on iOS.",
"content_html": "

Apple thinks the future of personal computing is touch. They promote especially the iPad Pro as the device which makes you want to ditch your conventional computing device: your notebook or desktop computer.

\n\n

Unfortunately if you want to transition to an iOS-only computing live, like some people already have, you first have to get all your old files on your new device.

\n\n

iCloud To the Rescue!

\n\n

Well, it would be funny if not iCloud sometimes seem to be the one which has to be rescued from itself, because it managed to not sync your files, not downloading it for viewing or even doesn’t display them at all on iOS devices.

\n\n

After the disaster the document picker on iOS 8 was—always crashing—with iOS 9 there’s thankfully an iCloud Drive app, so you have easy access to your files. The current state is that it works okay, but sometimes you have to reboot your device to make iCloud Drive download files again.

\n\n

If you manage to sync all your files from OS X to iCloud, you might not be able to open these files on your iPhone or iPad. While it’s no surprise that not every OS X app has a sibling on iOS (yet), at least all files created by Apple’s own apps which ship with OS X by default should work, right? Nope. Some are missing:

\n\n

.webloc files. You create those by dragging a URL from Safari’s location bar to e.g. your desktop. Solution: use DropBox in addition to iCloud. DropBox can read those links. If you don’t have a Dropbox account, you can use the app Webloc on iOS.

\n\n

.webarchive files. Web pages saved with Safari. Solution: use a 3rd party browser like Mercury.

\n\n

.eml files. Emails saved with Mail. Solution: maybe a 3rd party email client is able to open them?

\n\n

.txt files. Texts saved with TextEdit. iCloud Drive wants to open these in Numbers, which sometimes fails and . Solution: use a text editor which supports opening files from iCloud Drive like Byword.

\n\n

.textClipping. Selected text that was dragged to e.g. the desktop. Solution? Maybe, I never used text clippings to begin with.

\n\n

How to Handle Unreadable Files

\n\n

I used spotlight to find all file types which are not suitable for iOS and either converted them or just deleted them. You won’t believe the file cruft which gathered over the years. If the files are in an old file format it’s very likely I didn’t use them in a long time. If converting doesn’t work saving them as PDF might be the last hope to have at least a readable copy. And some files already have outlived their purpose. I just delete them.

\n\n

The files which I wasn’t able to make fit for iOS I tagged in the Finder as “iOS unreadable”. So I’m able to find these files again easily.

\n\n

Unfortunately tags are not fully supported iOS at the moment. No searching, editing, removing or applying tags in iCloud Drive app. Only the colored circles are visible next to the file name. If you want to see tags for folders, you have to switch to list view.

\n\n

If you are still reading it seems you’re quite interested in having an iOS-only setup. The good news is it’s entirely possible and also reasonable. There might be some apps which only exist on OS X, so there’s still possible limitation. But it’s definitely reasonable to have a personal or private iOS-only setup.

iCloud Drive has come a long way. After one and a half years iCloud Drive syncing works reliably and can be used as a cloud drive for iOS and macOS. It might even allow for replacing ordinary computers with iPhones and iPads. But because of the intricacies of iOS data storage it’s not straight forward to use.

\n\n

Sandboxes

\n\n

iOS apps can only access their own data. Therefor all data is stored on the device “within” the apps itself. No other app can access this data. Exceptions are apps like Photos or Contacts which can grant access to their data for another app if the user agrees.

\n\n

If for example a tutorial video is stored in iCloud Drive, there’s no easy way to view it in another app. It can be downloaded using the iCloud Drive app on iOS to watch it in this same app. But if you do this, it cannot easily be deleted from the iOS device, because deleting the file deletes it in iCloud Drive on all your devices as well.

\n\n

Access via Sharing Menu

\n\n

Another option is to save the video using the share sheet. The video will be saved in Photos, which means that a) it will be uploaded to iCloud Photo Library, which doubles the storage space needed for this video, and b) it is stored among your personal videos and photos, automatically sorted by date. This is quite unfortunate because it’s hard to find (who knows when this tutorial video has been created) and in the wrong spot among your very personal stuff.

\n\n

The last option is to use the sharing menu to copy it to another app. Then the video will be downloaded and stored within this app in the device. While the video downloads the receiving app can’t be used, because a modal (blocking) download dialog is displayed. Switching apps might stop a large download, because background activity is stopped by iOS after some time.

\n\n

In my testing downloading seems to fail depending on the app I choose. Infuse for example didn’t show the video in its file view after downloading it. The size of the app increased for the amount of the downloaded video, but it isn’t displayed in the app and therefore not playable. VLC however worked flawlessly.

\n\n

Access via iCloud File Picker

\n\n

VLC also has the ability to access iCloud Drive from within VLC itself. The file picker allows for convenient access to the files in iCloud Drive. Unfortunately it failed to download the file after picking it. Only the sharing menu worked.

\n\n

Conclusion

\n\n

Bottom line is: you can access your videos from iCloud Drive, but it’s not straight forward, has some pitfalls and might fail.

\n\n

Cloud storage is currently the only way to get rid of an ordinary computer and use touch devices only. Upload the data to the cloud only once from the soon to be replaced computer and download it just in time on the iPhone or iPad.

\n\n

Alternatives

\n\n

Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive are contenders for iCloud Drive. But iCloud Drive is the natural choice. It’s better integrated with iOS and most likely all iPhone photos are already on there. So you might already be spending some money for iCloud Drive. Spending money for more than one cloud storage service seems to be unreasonable. All cloud storages work about the same. If only iCloud Drive would work as expected all would be fine.

"
},
{
"id": "/difference-apple-music-itunes-match-nutshell",
"url": "https://michaelnordmeyer.com/difference-apple-music-itunes-match-nutshell",
"title": "The Difference Between Apple Music and iTunes Match in a Nutshell",
"date_published": "2016-02-28 11:56:02 +0000",
"summary": "Apple Music and iTunes Match have overlapping features which makes them confusing. I explain why it’s reasonable to have both.",
"content_html": "

Apple Music and iTunes Match have overlapping features which makes them confusing. I explain why it’s reasonable to have both.

\n\n

Apple has a detailed explanation of the differences between Apple Music and iTunes Match in regard to your music library, but they can be summed up more easily.

\n\n

iTunes Match matches your songs’ acoustic fingerprint against Apple’s Music catalog to find the perfect match while Apple Music only matches against your song’s details (such as name, artist, album). This means iTunes might choose a different version or recording of some of your songs instead of your original ones.

\n\n

iTunes Match automatically uploads songs which can’t be matched. Apple Music doesn’t allow uploading of songs which are not in the music catalog. Uploading is important if you have rare titles you want to keep.

\n\n

iTunes Match let’s you download DRM-free (freely copyable) music of your matched songs while Apple Music only let’s you download DRM-protected (copy protected) music. The quality for both is the same (256 Kbit/s AAC).

\n\n

iTunes Match lets you only listen to your music while Apple Music lets you listen to all the music Apple has in its music catalog. Both are available on all your Apple devices and allow for streaming and downloading.

\n\n

So iTunes Match is the choice if you want to have your meticulously built music library accessible on all devices without manually syncing parts of your library to your storage constrained devices. And then you can top it off with Apple Music if you like more music but don’t want to buy anymore.

\n\n

Apple-Music-only is for people who don’t have an extensive library of rare music and are fine with conveniently getting the Apple music catalog as it is.

\n\n

iTunes Match is $25 a year (~$2 a month), Apple Music is $9.99 a month ($119.88 a year) or $14.99 ($179.88 a year) for families of up to six people sharing the same credit card.

\n\n

Update

\n\n

It seems Apple has retired iTunes Match in favor of Apple Music. While I’m still able to restart my canceled iTUnes Match subscription, there doesn’t seem to be a way to start a new subscription for first-timers.

When Automattic announced project Calyspo it looked like they wanted to reinvent the WordPress admin panel. But then they released WordPress apps for macOS, Windows and Linux. These are essentially web apps running in an OS-native window, but they work well.

\n\n

The last couple of month (or years?) the WordPress iOS app didn’t change much, at least not on the user-facing side. They bought a very cool 3rd-party iOS WordPress app called Poster eons ago (mid 2013), which was better than the official WordPress app. They might have done it because they wanted to hire the talented developer behind this app, or they wanted to get rid of the better app to not fragment the WordPress app space or they just didn’t want to look bad, because a single developer could own them. Maybe all of it.

\n\n

But it took almost a year, if I recall correctly, to get some of the features into the official WordPress app. Changes were slow and the app always felt and still feels somewhat unfinished. Given the importance of mobile and the growing pressure from Tumblr and Medium it seems unwise have the iOS app linger.

A year or two ago I used Tumblr to take back the Internet and own my data. I posted links, images and videos on Tumblr to cross-post those to Twitter and Facebook.

\n\n

While it felt good and I liked to look at the Tumblr stream, the Twitter and Facebook streams didn’t look as good. To no surprise all links point back to Tumblr, which they should, but there was information and meaning lost in this. It wasn’t as clear where these posts actually point to.

\n\n

While I love Tumblr for the simplicity of creating video, image and link posts, I don’t like the way the URL for those posts look like. There’s always a unique ID between the blog URL and the post name. It’s there to be easier on Tumblr’s servers, which is of little interest for the user. But anyway, I digress.

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Having the data on Tumblr’s servers is not actually owning the data, but it’s much easier to get it out from Tumblr than from Twitter or Facebook.

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I stopped after a while and decided “what the heck, I just post to Twitter and Facebook again.” All these post are ephemeral and I don’t need to hold on to them. I even deleted my 8 year old Tumblr and moved part of the data into this blog.

Just cut the cord and stop watching TV. You won’t miss it. Don’t be a couch potato and let other people put ideas in your mind while spending your spare time.

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There are so many ways to spend your spare time. TV is linear. You have to be on time because the shows won’t wait. You don’t stop watching because you already paid. At the end of a program you immediately get fed with new shows, which makes switching off hard.

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If you for example surf the Internet at least you can choose what and when you want to consume. There’s much more content which you can choose from. It covers even the most arcane hobbies. This arcane stuff is done by people like you and me who happen to love this stuff. And it shows. Much more authentic, less spin.

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If you prefer laid back consumption there’s always YouTube. You have no idea what kind of interesting stuff people upload every day. From workouts and sports to healthy or not so healthy cooking and baking. From living off-grid to van-life or multi-million dollar homes. From old-school music documentaries to green-living documentaries.

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Cutting the cord saves a significant amount of money every month and every odd years when you buy a new TV set. If you want to you can use your TV and connect an Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV or Roku to get Netflix or any other movie or TV show for rent. Some modern TVs even have some of the services built-in. Some of these players start as low as $40.

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If you are a sports nut you can subscribe to channels like NFL, NBA, ESPN and others on Apple, Google, Amazon or Roku devices to get games and tailored content about it and pre- and post-match info. Whenever you want to.

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And if you realized you can access the content whenever you want to you might stop giving in to the urge or habit to watch TV and use your time differently because you can always get back to it. If you rent movies, you pick only those which are interesting to you and don’t watch stuff because it’s on.

"
},
{
"id": "/30-day-challenge-no-social-media-no-online-video",
"url": "https://michaelnordmeyer.com/30-day-challenge-no-social-media-no-online-video",
"title": "30 Day Challenge: No Social Media, No Online Video",
"date_published": "2016-02-02 15:55:32 +0000",
"summary": "I’m cutting down on external input like Social Media, RSS, YouTube and the Internet in general for a month to gain time and mental space.",
"content_html": "

It feels I’m late to write about this. I started my Social Media absence on 25th of January out of the blue. I reduced Social Media usage and RSS feeds for quite some time, but I still read a lot on the Internet. Like a couple hours a day.

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I also realized I was using YouTube quite often, sometimes for a couple of hours a day. Everybody is talking about the demise of blogging and RSS feeds in favour of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. But I think YouTube will be taking the lion share of online time in the coming years. But that’s a topic for another post.

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I’m not addicted to consuming information or being entertained online. I can easily go without Internet for a couple of days if I’m among interesting people. But if I’m alone or online for some reason, I tend to consume information online a lot. Like 16 hours a day, from waking up to falling asleep, sometimes even in one sitting.

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I also noticed I have the urge to read or watch interesting stuff if I find it. Sometimes I even sport completionist habits. But I retain less and less of this information. And I don’t spend my time on things which I create. It feels more and more superficial to consume information in this capacity because this information is ephemeral. Nobody will care what I read in a couple of days, even me.

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The Challenge

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So I made it a challenge. I mean, why not? Let’s see how I feel after 30 days without that much input. Definitely more mindful, hopefully more focused.

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And I also have the feeling that the days of wired Internet, (V)DSL or cable, are almost over. That contradicts the statement above — YouTube will be huge —, but it still stands. People only use smartphones or phablets. Why should they have two contracts for getting Internet access when one of these is limited to a single location? This is also a topic for another post. For me this is important, because without YouTube and online video in general I won’t use that much data and might get away with just having a single LTE Internet contract. Another insight.

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To wrap it up: I’m cutting down on external input like Social Media, RSS, YouTube and the Internet in general. This is going to be my February of 2016.

There are different email addresses you can add to an Apple ID. Here are the different types in a nutshell.

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Primary Email Address

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This is the email address for your Apple ID to login and normal communication. Everybody having an Apple ID has a primary address.

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Alternate Email Address

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Alternate addresses can help people find you on Apple services. Most people won’t need an alternative address.

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Rescue Email Address

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Rescue email addresses are used for accessing your Apple ID when the primary one isn’t working for some reason. This is a security measure and might help you.

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Notification Email Address

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This address is only used for notification purposes if you have two-factor authentication enabled and don’t have a rescue email address.

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If you get the error Your new Apple ID cannot be the same as your notification email address it means that these have to be different email addresses. The point of the notification email address is to be different than the normal one for security reasons. All those addresses can be changed when managing your Apple ID.

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Apple has a thorough explanation in their knowledge base for these different types of email addresses.

I use highlights in ebooks to create excerpts, which I save in Evernote. If I want to fresh up my mind about the ideas of the book, I just have to read the excerpt.

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In my opinion this is done easier reading a single file than to flip through a book to hunt for the highlights or use the highlight index, which interrupts immersing myself in the text. I do this both in Kindle and iBooks ebooks.

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While the Kindle highlights and notes can be seen on your Kindle page on kindle.amazon.com, the iBooks highlights and notes can only be exported via email. And this export is creating a bunch of problems, which shouldn’t be. Most likely copyright holders aka publishing companies asked Apple to do this. So here are the problems, which drive me nuts.

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Highlights Are Omitted From Export

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Hightlights, which are too long, won’t be exported via email. And there is no warning or notification, because it happens silently in the background.

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Highlights Are Exported in the Wrong Order

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Highlights and notes are exported in the order they were made. That means highlights made at an earlier time will be ordered before those made at a later time. This is bad, because if you re-read the book and highlight new passages, they will be out of order when exporting. The exported text will be harder to read and out of context.

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What is especially bad is both problems combined: you realized while exporting that some highlights are missing. You succumb to the tedious work of splitting up the highlights: deleting the highlight first, then creating several smaller highlights for the deleted highlight. Because these are made at a later time than the ordinary highlights you made when reading the book linearly, the result is an out-of-order export.

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Thanks, Apple, for ordering highlights by time and not location. And thanks, publishing companies, for thinking I’m going to highlight all content of your books to publish them somewhere on the internet.